Part 2: A New Nation Inches Toward Standards — in Guns, Clocks and Culture

In the 21st century, we take it for granted that the parts assembled into manufactured goods are identical — no defects, no variations. Making that happen — 200 years ago in central Connecticut — was a huge advancement, the first big step away from relying on handcrafted artisanship, toward mass production.

Why here? Connecticut had two rising industries, clocks and guns, both with products built from small, complex parts, both ripe for revolution. And in a classic story of innovation, it appears they fed on each other exactly as the state embraced standardization in other ways as well.

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Eli Whitney was already an accomplished mechanical tinkerer when he graduated from Yale in 1792, having run a nail-making operation as a 14-year-old boy in Massachusetts. His invention of the cotton gin to remove seeds from certain types of the crop, while he was in Georgia after college, changed the economy of the South but failed as a New Haven business, amid patent disputes and a fire.

So in 1798, Whitney used his Yale connections, chiefly with Oliver Wolcott Jr. of Granby, the U.S. Treasury secretary, to win a contract to make 10,000 muskets — something he had never made at all, let alone in huge quantity. He got a cash advance and set up an armory in Hamden.

Two myths surround this famous deal: that Whitney vowed to make the guns out of interchangeable parts, and succeeded, thus launching mass production; and that interchangeable parts were brand new in the industrial imagination.

In fact, like many technology evolutions, earlier versions of guns made of uniform parts had cropped up, especially in Europe. Whitney did not attempt to demonstrate that he could make the muskets out of identical parts until 1801, and even then, he duped his audience, among them President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson.

"He understood how important it was but he faked his batch," said Dean Nelson, a firearms history expert and administrator of the Museum of Connecticut History.

Whitney told his workers to make sure he had a handful of guns with parts that did fit together, for the demonstration. "But he could never do that in production," Nelson said. "He didn't understand the importance of gauging."

Still, he talked about making parts out of stamping tools and machines that he devised. And one of the people listening was his acquaintance Eli Terry, the clock-maker from East Windsor who had set up shop in Plymouth, now Thomaston. By 1806, Terry inked a deal to sell 4,000 clock mechanisms at a time when a master clock-maker could turn out a few dozen a year.

Working with wood, not metal, Terry spent two years making the right machinery to stamp out clock wheels. While Whitney was nine years late with his musket deliveries and full of excuses, Terry succeeded.

Terry went on to patent the shelf clock, bringing time to the masses, or at least not just to the rich. He later sold his enterprise to Seth Thomas and Silas Hoadley, who deployed the burgeoning Waterbury brass industry to make standardized metal workings.

Just as Whitney was getting underway, in 1799, Simeon North started making guns at his saw mill, also with the idea of using interchangeable parts. He, too, had a connection to the clock business: His brother-in-law, Elisha Cheney, was a clock-maker, the son and nephew of the clock-makers who had trained Eli Terry. Cheney later moved his shop just upstream from North's mill, and made screws and small parts for North.

Cooking Up New Industries

Proximity matters, as the world would later learn in the New Britain machine shops, along Capitol Avenue in Hartford, in Palo Alto and in the labs of Cambridge, Mass.

"People who come up with a good idea in one area, if they are close enough to each other, those ideas quickly spread from one application to another," said Walter W. Woodward, the Connecticut state historian and a UConn professor.

This was a time of standardization across the culture, not just in manufacturing. Connecticut became the first state to pay for public school education starting in 1795, using money from the sale of Western lands.

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A year later, in Hartford, Amelia Simmons published the new nation's first cookbook, "American Cookery," including recipes for soft gingerbread, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, Indian pudding and spruce beer. Simmons, self-proclaimed as an orphan and household domestic, used "cookie" and "slaw" for the first time in print.

By 1806, Noah Webster published the first U.S. dictionary, standardizing spelling. He later picked up some of Simmons' words.

And in 1810, The Hartford Fire Insurance Co. opened its doors at the site of its present campus, on Asylum Hill in Hartford. The insurer quickly set about advancing safe building techniques, now that its policyholders had a shared interest.

Standardization in the gun trade required not just a new product but a new industry to create it. Like Whitney, North developed equipment, including a milling machine, crucial to forming metal parts without having to file them by hand. He signed a contract to sell 20,000 pistols to the government, with the condition that the locks, the shooting mechanisms, be fully interchangeable.

In 1812, with the ramp-up for the second war with England an urgent national priority, President James Madison paid a visit to North's factory.

Because of the myths, Whitney garners more credit than North, a sore point in Berlin.

"Both men understood the two main ideas behind the American system — interchangeability and mechanization — but while Whitney excelled in publicizing his knowledge, North was more successful in executing them," historian Ellsworth S. Grant wrote in "The Miracle of Connecticut."

Whitney died in 1825 of prostate cancer, not before inventing pain-easing devices for that condition. And North lived until 1852, long enough to compete against a factory in Hartford that owed him its heritage.

The seeds of that great factory were planted in 1826, when 24-year-old Samuel Collins started to mass produce axes in Canton. He built worker housing, shops, a bank, a hotel and even a church. In 1832, Collins hired a young machinist named Elisha K. Root, who reinvented the way the axe was made.

Four years after that, a restless young inventor from Hartford, with the soul of a showman, won a patent for his revolving-cylinder pistol. He and Root would take interchangeable parts, and Hartford, to the top of the world.